- Drugs
- Friends & Family
submitted by: Susanne Johnson
I met Stormi at the Heroes in Recovery 6K in Atlanta. It was her first time attending a run, and she came to support her son who has been in treatment for almost half a year for his addiction to methamphetamine. She always had a gut feeling that something was going on with her son but was not sure about his drug use until he came to her asking for help. Today she is not sure if she really did not know about his drug use or if she was just denying it, hoping her suspicions weren’t true. Her son is 17 years old, and she is very glad that he asked for help that early. Stormi is married and has another son who is 20 years old, and he has no trouble with addiction and a very different personality. Thinking about how they were when little, she believes their different present situations make sense.
Everything has already changed for the better, and Stormi is amazed by how chaotic their lives once were. “He is my hero,” she says about her son, and you can see her gratitude, the thankfulness only a mother who knows how close she was to losing her son can show. Stormi understands the necessity of family support and family healing. She is aware that she needs recovery from troublesome days as well. Healing takes place together. Stormi attends the family programs her son’s treatment center offers, and she gets a lot out of them. She let go of feeling that her son’s addiction was her fault and that she did something wrong. She has also learned a lot about enabling and how she unconsciously did exactly this for a long time. The family program made her stronger and continues to teach her how to deal with the situation.
The treatment center her son first attended was not a good fit. Finding the perfect place for each individual matters, and both he and she are happy with his current treatment location. Stormi’s family is not wealthy, and paying for treatment did hurt the family budget, but she would pay a million dollars to rescue her son and then worry later about where to get the money. Her son also attends 12-step meetings every day, sometimes twice a day, to stabilize his sobriety. He will transition out of treatment shortly, but will stay close by and keep going back as an alumni to keep in touch.
Stormi would like to tell the other mothers out there, “There is always hope.”